real, fantastical, and indeterminate

Technology Empowers Our Humanity

Not that may years ago, read/write CD/ROM drives were essential and a good one was quite expensive. I once paid top dollar to get a top rated drive from Toshiba. It never worked. I called Toshiba dozens of times over 6 months trying to get it working. It would take an hour to get past hold, read off serial numbers and customer info, fax in receipts, explain the problem all over again, to get transferred and repeat it all, to get disconnected, go through it all yet again, only to be told to clean the drive, to call Microsoft, to contact Intel, to reinstall Windows, to buy higher quality disks, to change bios settings, or buy a new connection cable.

In the end, it turned out that this was a known issue with the drive, but Toshiba had a policy not to admit to any such issues. Instead, they intentionally made me jump onerous technical support hurdles and run off on expensive and time-consuming wild goose chases for six months before they finally admitted as much. Most people gave up well before that, but I was on a mission. Nevertheless, in the end I tossed the drive in the garbage.

Everyone has their customer support horror stories. Not that long ago, such infuriating experiences were the norm, not the exception. I had many similar experiences with Sony in particular and resolved never to buy anything from them ever again.

But today customer support has transformed dramatically. Today, wonderful customer support is the norm, not the exception.

AT&T exemplifies this welcome new normal for customer service. The hotspot on my mobile phone quit working. Although I knew it was not an issue with AT&T because it worked on my wife’s phone, I went to their site, hit chat, immediately got a wonderful representative named Stephanie who happily helped me reset my phone, 5 minutes later my hotspot was working!

That’s great customer service. And it’s not just huge companies that are putting the service back in customer service. My garage door light started blinking in a regular pattern as if indicating some error. I called Guardian Garage Doors and immediately got a wonderful guy on the phone. He heard my issue and asked me to text him a video. I did so and after a short hold said their engineers didn’t know what the problem was but wanted me to send it in so they could diagnose it. He offered to rush out a replacement. But minutes later he called back and suggested I try replacing my LED bulb. I did so even though it seemed silly, LED’s don’t do that. But apparently they do. That fixed it!

This is nothing remotely like the bad old days of Toshiba and Sony era customer “support.” The kind of great customer support we often see today is greatly facilitated by technology. It is enabled by the Internet, by chat technology, by searchable knowledge bases, by intelligent call routing systems, and by interconnected global workforces.

But while these technologies are incredibly empowering, real people and attitudes are still essential to great customer support. Technology doesn’t make representatives so pleasantly informal yet professional in demeanor. Technology doesn’t ensure that customer service departments are staffed to connect quickly and to stay on as long as it takes to resolve an issue. It takes sensible management to not interrogate you to prove your identity, ownership, and warranty. It is an explicit choice to authorize representatives to own issues even if they are not directly responsible. And it is their conscious decision to admit to issues candidly rather than reflexively conceal and deny them beyond all rationality.

So, while I often bash private sector corporations, I must give credit where credit is due. Some things do get better. Customer service stands in direct contradiction to widespread fears of a cold and impersonal technology-dominated future. It shows us that technology, properly implemented, can make our lives and our interactions not only more efficient and satisfying, but at the same time more friendly, more personal, more sensible, and yes, more human as well.